CONSPIRACIES HAPPEN.

HISTORY IS FULL OF THEM. DENYING THAT MAKES ONESELF INTO A BLEATING SHEEP. RES-PUBLICA AS ANTAGONIST TO CON-SPIRARE.

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Abstract: A lot of the history of the world originated in conspiracies. If the beating of the wings of a butterfly can generate a hurricane, a week later, surely human conspiracies can do better than that. Actually the financial crash of 2008 originated as a vast conspiracy. It is true that, in general, other ingredients are also crucial to generate history, such as, for example, consilience, but this is for another essay. Here I show why democracy ignores the concept of conspiracy at its own risk. The USA has been involved in several of them in the last century, and some, after prodigious entanglements, have started to backfire. I finish by a long list of mostly recent conspiracies that have come to light (a good conspiracy, of course, does not come to light).

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In every single culture, mental habits are taught and reset all the time with mantras. (One never uses twice the same brain, so culture has to rebuild it all the time, same as it was before.)

One such mental enforcement, in the USA, is attached to the notion of “conspiracy theories”, more exactly to the notion that ‘one is a quack if one believes in conspiracy theories’. Educated Americans are supposed to ooze with contempt when they detect someone who “believes in conspiracy theories” (much better to believe in God, the one and only big conspirator in the sky). This is overdone to the point that all and any critical thinking is viewed with suspicion, and prone to “believing in conspiracy theories”. Soon all and any thinking is viewed with suspicion,  an inferior sort of activity, and it is much better to watch sports on TV, and live as much on credit as possible, since the friendly bankers would never conspire with credit rating agencies, real estates brokers, assessors, and legislators…

It is true that schizophrenia most commonly manifests itself with auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking… And often by believing in a crazy conspiracy. 

But any creative thinking is initially disorganized, and may represent a significant departure from previous perceptions of the causality of a situation. And the situation may perdure: to a classical physicist, Quantum Mechanics is completely crazy (particle go through walls, are in several places at the same time, etc…) By condemning at the outset intellectual disorganization and an extremely critical, suspicious spirit, one condemns minds to apathy and vulgarity.

“Conspire” comes from con-spirare, which means breathing together: it is the notion that people can be so close to each other, they breathe together. And then soon they think together. Then they do something advantageous to themselves, by acting together. Then anything can happen if they are not interrupted, from the KKK, to bankers making everyone believe that it’s their right to own the world, and the best path to prosperity. Racism in the USA was long, not just an ideology and an emotionality, but also a conspiracy. The Ivy League school system, and societies such as “Skull and Bones”, can be viewed as conspiracies (to help the ongoing reign of a plutocracy).

Labor Day, initially the First of May, celebrated some horrendous and lethal conspiracy in Chicago, that resulted in the execution of innocent union organizers. So it came to symbolize worldwide, the union and oppression of workers. Then crafty conspirators ordered Congress to deliberately change the date of “Labor day” to the opposite side of the year, the first Monday of September, so that the American people would lose its collective memory of one clear example of its abuse by plutocrats, and how they can manipulate the police and justice to their egregious advantage. Amusingly, people, worldwide, now remember an American event, that a (plutocratic) conspiracy robbed from the common American memory. Not coincidentally, workers are better organized overseas.

To stop such conspiracies, intellectuals have to consider their right, duty, pleasure and calling to intervene, and disrupt them, by exhibiting their intricate details. And people ought to get in their thick skulls, that, contrarily to what those who insist that there are no conspiracies, insist upon, there are, in truth, plenty. History is so full of them, one could argue that they constitute its skeleton.

Nazism, for example, was a vast conspiracy (by the top Nazis themselves and a set of plutocrats in Germany and the USA). We also know (from a little known document) that W.W.I was a conspiracy (between half a dozen top generals of the so called Prussian General Staff, 16 months before the Sarajevo assassination, that they manipulated into a casus belli). The so called “One Hundred Year War”, in truth initially a struggle between two French houses, boiled down to a conspiracy of lawyers in Paris against Isabelle de France, queen of England, daughter of the very French king those lawyers had feared nearly as much as they did her. The result of that conspiracy was war between France and England that lasted from 1337 to 1815: so conspiracies can have lasting effect.

Christianism itself was imposed as a conspiracy of Constantine and his close advisers (some he later executed), and his pagan Franks (who helped provide the muscle to conquer the Roman empire). The rest of the tumultuous history of the Late Roman empire was pretty much an entanglement of conspiracies on steroids.

The fall of the Athenian republic was a conspiracy: imperialistic Persia secretly paid Sparta to make war against Athens, to the point that Sparta could build for itself a fleet as big as the Athenian fleet. Then Sparta destroyed Athens’ fleet, and starved the Athenian republic into surrender. Because Sparta was posing as the defender of the little cities in Greece against big bad Athens, and because fascist Persia was well known to be the exact opposite of Greek ideals in roughly all ways, the Spartans kept their financing hush hush. Hereditary regimes, such as North Korea, are pretty much conspiracies.

The republican process is the exact opposite of letting conspirators rule, because the “thing” (res) becomes public. By reminding itself everyday that conspiracies could not possibly exist, the USA allows itself to fall prey to, well, conspirators. Stealth is a lot of their strength. The financial crisis is a case in point, with all the financiers having breathed together, for quite a very long time.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.com/

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More examples of conspiracies:

Many coups and revolutions, or invasions, started as conspiracies. The assassination of the father of Alexander, clearly a conspiracy, was never sorted out (was Alexander involved?). Caesar was assassinated in a conspiracy. Now the USA itself got started in a conspiracy (there were French secret service agents very active in Philadelphia before the revolution). Now let’s concentrate on the USA, in a very short recent period: 

President Obama recognized (spring 2009) that the USA conspired (with the Shiites!) to overthrow Iranian democracy in a coup in 1953 (replacing it by a fascist regime led by the Shah).

In Yalta, in Crimea, in winter 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin conspired to give Eastern Europe to Stalin. They even jotted it down in what Churchill called the “naughty document”. The French had no been invited because then they would have conspired with the British to stop that non sense (which made a lot of sense to Roosevelt and Stalin, as they conspired to divide the world between each other).

Then Roosevelt when to Egypt, to conspire with Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia. The conspiracy was Saudi oil versus American corruption, while ruling the people with a feudal theocracy.

In general, in a conspiracy, the USA used systematically Islam as a trick to drug the Middle East, occupying its mind with religiosity so as to be better able to exploit it. That required conspiracies within conspiracies, such as when the USA financed Pakistani nuclear weapons, while fighting nominally their ex allies of the Qaeda that Pakistani intelligence was supporting. No wonder the American head is spinning so much, the true north is hard to find.

The USA, or more exactly Roosevelt and his government, were hostile to France, and had conspired to occupy her in 1944. They had even prepared an occupation  currency. The conspiracy collapsed when it turned out that the million man French army was just as big as the 66 divisions or so that the USA had in Europe (plus the top US general, Patton was not anti French; instead he detested the nasty conspiracy he had been victim of inside the US army: he had been reduced in rank, so he had to obey his own clueless pupils).

Patton also detested Stalin. Unaware of the conspiracy in Yalta, he wanted to march on Berlin. Instead his superior, Eisenhower, just the general commanding the Western front, wrote directly to Stalin to confirm to the Soviet dictator that the US Army would not get to Berlin first (as per the conspiracy). 

The Eastern European troops that had fought Stalin on the side of the Nazis, in the hope of freeing their countries from Stalin’s cruel subjugation, surrendered to the Western Allies, under the condition that they would not be given to Stalin. In a side conspiracy, they were given to Stalin, who killed them all.

In a conspiracy many Nazis were recycled by Soviets and Americans for many tasks, not all them noble. The notorious “butcher of Lyon”, Barbie, who executed, often by torture, 5,000 people, was sent to South America to set up arms and drug networks that the CIA, and even Israel (!) found most helpful.

In general the CIA conspired to set up drug networks all around the world, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, in an effort of self financing. Now some Pakistani leaders are whining about it, and the USA has pontificated that the Taliban financed itself with drugs, which it should know, since it set it up… And that this is intolerable, which is a bit rich.

A famous little conspiracy in the same spirit was Iran-Contra. It consisted in selling weapons secretly to the Khomeini/Shiite regime in Iran, while official ally Saddam Hussein (supported by the defense department of the USA) was fighting it in a terrible war, and using the proceeds of said sales to finance the Contras, a guerilla in Nicaragua. (Remember that the Shiites were secret allies of the USA in a conspiracy since 1953).

Conspiracies, as the list above shows, often backfire: for example Israel conspired to support Hamas so as to undermine the PLO.

Most of the conspiracies above are around the Second World War, which may have been the greatest conspiracy of them all. Stalin and Hitler conspired to dismantle Poland. Then Roosevelt and Stalin conspired to dismantle a lot of Germany, occupy Poland, and practice ethnic cleansing throughout (more than ten million Germans were expelled from their ancestral lands, solving the German problem once and for all, in a final solution of sorts).

The official curious apathy towards Nazism, doubled with a deliberate hostility to the French republic, was an apparent American conspiracy to facilitate the growth of the malignant Hitler. The Congress of the USA designated the French republic, a democracy, as hostile, because France was getting ready to fight Hitler. But it was all a conspiracy: Roosevelt made no mystery that he disliked the European empires, and he wanted the USA to take their place. Waiting, and aiding and abetting  Hitler hopefully could lead to the destruction of Europe. That was never said that way, instead, it was conspired. The USA, by putting France in a bad light, made it so that the Netherlands and Belgium did not cooperate with France as they ought to have (under American pressure, Belgium refused to build its segment of the Maginot line, through which Nazi tanks passed).

Instead of really genuinely helping Britain, a lot of the American “help” during W.W.II consisted in lending to Britain crucial military equipment at interesting rates, insuring that the UK would be crushed by debt at the end of the war, and would be as a serf to the American lord.

The Shoah was also a conspiracy. First, of course, the Nazis kept it secret. Although, with more than 20,000 camps throughout Germany (latest count, 2009), it required a lot of breathing together to hide it.

The conspiracy extended to the Allies. Every significant leader knew that the Jews were being exterminated (be it only because the French government had made formal declarations to this effect). To stop the extermination, it would have been enough for Churchill and Roosevelt to inform the German people of what was really going on, and that the criminals would be punished according to the law, for war crimes (a notion the Germans were familiar with, from W.W.I). But, in a conspiracy, Churchill and Roosevelt stayed silent (amazingly Jews such as ben Gurion were part of the conspiracy, because they preferred a lot of dead Jews and a bigger Israel, or so he said, the idea being that as the surviving Jews would hate Britain for having abandoned them, they would go to Palestine, instead of the UK; I am just relating what ben Gurion said; after a while, he was not keen to explain the subject further). 

As I already mentioned, the most recent, in-your-face conspiracy has been the financial crisis. As Simon Johnson points out in his “Baseline Scenario” blog, June 13, 2009: “We have effectively nationalized any banking system losses, but we’ll let bank executives enjoy the full benefits of the upside.  How much shareholders participate remains to be seen; there will be no effective reining in of insider compensation…” Now the insiders connect to a vast conspiracy, that Johnson calls an oligarchy (which it is), because, per his status in the world, he has to be exquisitely polite, but that I more precisely call a plutocracy (money/underground/evil power). Now, of course, if trillions of dollars are transferred from poor People to the filthy rich, it can only be as the result of a conspiracy. it does happen magically.